


Dark Stripes

by scioscribe



Category: The Talisman - Stephen King & Peter Straub
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Magic, Not Black House Compliant, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Depression, Worldbuilding, mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:47:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26163616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Years later, the weight of the events ofThe Talismancatches up with Jack, and this time it's Richard who has to find something in the Territories that will help ease his pain.
Relationships: Jack Sawyer & Richard Sloat
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10
Collections: King of Exchanges 2020





	Dark Stripes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cyphomandra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyphomandra/gifts).



If you had asked Richard Sloat—who had become Richard Sawyer—what had happened when he was thirteen, he would have pushed his glasses up his nose and regarded the question with a kind of puzzled thoughtfulness, as if he’d been quizzed on the solution to an interesting but difficult math problem.

There was a fog inside him, wrapped thickly around the last few weeks of 1981, but from that fog had emerged Richard’s personal catechism:

_That was a rough time, but it’s over now._

All of that—the fog that in his head somehow had the tang of salt air and hot smell of overworked batteries, the fog that rattled like a train, a fog that made his skin itch—had been placed in some containment zone deep in Richard’s soul, and he knew, distantly, that he had been the one to put it there. His thirteen-year-old self had looked at the exact circumstances of his father’s death, of Aunt Lily’s remission, of his passage out of the Thayer School, and said, _No more of this._ He’d grabbed onto forgetfulness like it was a life rope.

Aunt Lily, he knew, had done the same thing. _I was running such a high fever then, Jacky, Richie boy._

It took until the winter of his first year at college for Richard to understand the cost of that forgetfulness.

***

That was the winter that a bitter melancholy descended on Jack.

Psychology was, to Richard, as shapeless and mysterious as its ink-blots; it had none of the hard, shining beauty of chemistry, none of the inarguable reality. He had the feeling that you could be agnostic about psychology. Still, it was plain even to him that this was some distanced hangover from that awful time in 1981. From—he groped for the memories still discernible through the fog—the Sunlight Home. From Aunt Lily’s cancer.

“You should talk to an analyst,” Richard said frankly. “It’s been proven to do some good.”

He also thought it might do Jack some good to end his gap year early—have a _distraction_ or two—but he’d always left a buffer of silence around Jack’s travelling.

Jack lack back on Richard’s narrow dorm bed. His bare feet hung off the edge of it, looking soft and milky-white, and it took Richard a moment to see what was wrong with them. Jack had lost his calluses. Usually his feet were tanned and horned and gnarled from near-constant walking— _Travellin’ Jack_ —but now they looked like they’d never been used. Jack covered his face with one hand for a moment, a gesture of hollow exasperation.

“I can’t go to an analyst, Richard. There’s too much I can’t talk about.” There was a squashy-but-dry sound as his lips let out a hard laugh against his hand. “I can’t even talk to you about it. Seabrook Island stuff.”

 _You can talk to me about that,_ Richard almost said, because he’d finally learned to read novels—even to read some of the fabulists, like Borges and Malamud, the ones who really did tie reality up like a cat’s cradle when it suited them. But he changed the subject instead, and as he did, he felt a dark flush steal up the back of his neck.

“How was your drive, by the way?”

In other, better times, Jack might have teased him about the sudden dodge there, but he just went on looking weary. “I flew.”

“But you don’t,” Richard said, as stunned as if Jack had said, _I took a Conestoga wagon. I swam it all in a backcrawl. I rode up on a Shetland pony._

Jack hadn’t flown since they were kids.

 _I have an inner ear thing,_ Jack said when anyone asked. _It makes me so dizzy I almost fall out of the seat._

 _I don’t remember you ever having problems with your balance,_ Richard had said once, when this had come up.

Jack had smiled at him—a trace of wistfulness in his eyes. _It’s just a Story, Richard._ The way he said it, Richard could hear the capital letter. _When things get too complicated, it’s good to have a Story. The truth is it’s just too risky._

_Statistically speaking, it’s one of the safest—_

_Not for me,_ Jack had said, and somehow Richard had known to leave the conversation there.

Now, Jack said dully, “I decided to live dangerously. It didn’t matter. I haven’t been able to flip in weeks, so I sure as hell wasn’t going to do it on _accident_.”

Richard opened his mouth to ask what Jack meant by _flip_ , but then he felt some ghost of a touch: a hand clamping hard around his arm and nearly wrenching it off. Jack dragging him along. They’d gone over—

Jack raised himself up on his elbows, suddenly worried. “Richard? I didn’t mean to bring it up. I just decided I could risk flying, that’s all I meant. No dizziness lately.”

Richard looked at him and felt a shock of tenderness as painful as a bruise. Here was Jack, his Jack, and Richard had made it so Jack couldn’t talk to him.

He had known the real depths of Jack’s bright, essential sweetness, his _goodness,_ during those weeks—Richard could sense that—and he’d let that get lost in the fog. He couldn’t remember what all Jack had done for him, but he knew what Jack had gone on doing, for the last few years. Jack had let him leave it all on Seabrook Island.

Whatever Jack had done since then, he had done alone. He had let Richard have his sturdy world.

Well, to hell with it. (It was not a sentiment Richard had felt very often.) Jack needed him now, and Richard would go with him, go to him, the way he somehow knew he had done before. And this time, he would make it stick.

He heard Jack’s voice in his head, echoing funnily: _You shoulda killed_ both _of the Ellis brothers!_

“It’s all right,” Richard said. The words felt clumsy; even his heartbeat in his chest felt clumsy and galumphing and ill-timed. Late, so late to do the right thing. “You can talk about it. I think it’s time I remembered everything, don’t you?”

Jack stared at him. “Richard, are you _sure_?”

“I’m sure.”

***

A week later, Richard’s head was thick with a kind of horrible buzzing, as if the fogged-up place inside him had cleared only to reveal hundreds of bloated, creeping flies, their emerald-and-amber eyes flashing madly, their mandibles humming with excitement. Oh, Jesus. The abomination of Reuel Gardner’s face, breaking open to reveal that slush of white worms. Those same white worms _hatching out of his own skin._ The creeping trees in Point Venuti, their black roots as slinky and muscular as an octopus’s arms. The things in the Blasted Lands. The bad Wolfs. And— _Jason_ —his father, his own father, hurling stones at them on the beach, his father and Morgan of Orris spinning like a mad pinwheel. All the things his father had done.

There were all these horrors crawling around inside him now, and to counteract them, there was only the Talisman—its arc of rosy-white light—and the Wolf who had driven them back to New Hampshire; and beneath those two good marvels, there was only really Richard’s love for Jack, which was all that was holding him together just then.

Jack told him there were better things in the Territories— _maybe all the bad is worse there, but all the good is better too; it’s_ deeper—but he said it without any feeling.

Talking was helping—maybe—but it wasn’t helping him enough. With all Jack had in his head, how could it? He had seen everything Richard had and more. Infinitely more.

“I think I’m cracking up,” Jack said one day. He hadn’t left Richard’s dorm in a long time, and he barely even left the room; when they were socked back-to-front in the narrow twin bed at night, Richard’s nose pressed up against Jack’s shoulder, he could tell Jack smelled sour and unwashed, like he hadn’t been showering.

_He smells like Osmond did, and I just hope he doesn’t know it._

“I brought her the Talisman, and it was like—like my feet left the edge of the cliff. I didn’t have solid ground anymore, not when I was done with it all, and I was like Wile E. Coyote running in thin air. Above this big nothing. And I think I finally looked down, chum.”

“Don’t call me chum,” Richard said, but their ancient joke got only a pallid smile from Jack this time.

Then Jack said, “They call it soul-sickness over there,” and something in Richard spun hard towards those words, like a compass needle at last finding true north.

He made some kind of unintelligent noise, something he suspected sounded way too much like a startled moo.

Aunt Lily would have had a field day with that one, but Jack didn’t laugh. Jack didn’t even seem to realize anything had happened.

“In the Territories.” He still said the word with a kind of shyness, even though it was a little dulled now: all of the joy had run out of Jack except this little bit of wonder, that he could talk about all this with Richard after all. Richard hated himself for having made that so precious. “Whatever this is, whatever you want to call it—depression, shell shock, a breakdown. _Soul-sickness_.”

“Do they have a cure?” Richard said quietly. Every nerve ending in his body seemed to be awake and alert.

“It doesn’t matter. I still can’t get there.”

And maybe, Richard thought, that meant yes. Yes, they did.

Their soul-sickness would be worse than depression in Jack’s American Territories, it would be deeper, but maybe their cure for it would be better than anything Richard could get at a New Haven drugstore. And if Jack couldn’t go to the Territories to get it, then Richard would have to go himself.

***

Easier said than done.

He had listened to all Jack’s stories, and this time, he’d seared them into his memory: no more forgetting, not again. Not with what it might have cost Jack. (Would they be here now, with a ring of dirt around Jack’s neck like a collar, if Richard hadn’t chosen to forget? He couldn’t be sure, but he thought maybe not. He thought he could have taken better care of Jack’s soul than that, if he’d really known what he was dealing with.) So he knew about Speedy Parker’s awful hobo wine, as rotten-tasting as if the grapes had suppurated instead of fermented. Magic juice. Except Jack, dammit, had already told Richard that he was pretty sure the magic juice was just a placebo, and if Richard knew that going in, he couldn’t see how it could possibly work for him. All he would end up with was the feeling that he’d drunk some kind of fruity paint thinner.

He even thought about driving to New Hampshire, to the Alhambra, and seeing if he could find Parkus’s Twinner. Parkus would help. Maybe he could even drag Richard into the Territories himself.

_Tomorrow. If I can’t do this today, I’ll look for him tomorrow._

He had picked a shaded enclave for what he thought of as his exit-site. It was an arch of dusty stone, a ways away from any of the busier parts of Yale’s campus, so no one would be there to see him disappear if, by some miracle, he _did_ flip. He’d chosen the spot for the privacy, sure, but also just because it looked and felt and even _smelled_ old. The stone was cold to the touch, like it had soaked up centuries of Connecticut winters. All of it was as close as he could come to what Jack had spoken of as the rest of the Territories.

 _Flip,_ Richard told himself.

Nothing happened. He was just an eighteen-year-old boy in corduroys and a wool coat, shivering in the shadowed cold.

_Worlds like an onion, Jack said. You peel away our world, and then the Territories are underneath it, smaller and more pungent and real._

Richard tried thinking of that, tried visualizing a layer of onion peeling up and away, but all that happened was what he could taste a kind of ghost of a liver-and-onion sandwich he’d had two days ago.

He felt an unwieldy surge of anger. Why couldn’t he do it? His _father_ had done it. His father had done it a thousand times.

 _You’re not your father,_ Jack had said to him once.

He hoped not. But—a thread of hope split through the anger—he wasn’t Jack either. He was trying Jack’s methods, Jack’s visuals—and the Territories were _magic_. They didn’t work by any of the rules Richard cared for, any rules about the value of reproducible results. He was looking at something even more amorphous than psychology. Some swimming ink blot, lit with the Talisman’s rainbow light; something he had to name for himself.

 _Over there, they talked about Jack like he was close to being a god. And that’s the world you’re trying to get to, Richie boy, a world that at its best is so good that it knows in its bones that_ Jack _is good, a world that knows how much you have to save him. The Territories must want you to come over, if Jack’s in danger, because they love him too. So just let_

_yourself_

flip.

Richard opened his eyes on the most dazzling winter he’d ever seen.

The snowflakes tumbling down looked as intricate and soft as lace: they were bigger than any Richard had seen before, big enough that he could catch sight of their patterns before they fell to the ground. They were the same white as the white light in the Talisman.

As Richard watched them, caught in a kind of dumbfounded awe, he saw a bird lighting through the falling snow. It was a deep blue-black, like indigo ink, and its beak was shaped like a scoop. As Richard watched, it flew beneath a snowflake, opened its mouth, and caught a single one perfectly. Its beak was a basket, Richard suddenly understood, and it wasn’t eating the snow or drinking it as it melted, it was _carrying_ the snowflakes, as many as it could. Somehow it was cold enough itself that the snow didn’t melt in its mouth. Richard watched it collect its basketful of snow until the glittering white heaped up in its beak looked like an overflowing tablespoon of sugar.

Then the bird flew off. Where? To whom? Had it been trained to gather the snowflakes, or was it just doing what its species, in the Territories, did by its very nature?

Richard sucked in a chestful of cold, clear air.

 _Oh,_ he thought dizzily. _Jack was right. The air is better._

He was in the Territories, and he knew now that the smell of winter was the smell of fresh ice and bonfires and leather and the caramel someone was dripping over a distant apple.

And Aunt Lily’s Twinner was here—well, not here, probably, but in the Territories’ winter palace, wherever that was. Queen Laura DeLoessian, who wouldn’t know Richard at all.

In his last conversation with Aunt Lily—he’d called her from a phonebooth in the corner of a downtown diner, where his carryout for him and Jack filled up the booth with the warm, muggy smell of hamburgers—she had said, “You’re starting to sound like him, you know. You’re getting the same way of not telling me things.” She sounded hopeful in a way he would have missed just a few years ago. “How important are these secrets you’re keeping from your guardian, Richie?”

“Maybe a lot.”

“Maybe one day you’ll have to tell me,” Lily Sawyer said recklessly. “Because I am oh-for-three right now, kid. All the men in this family keep lighting out without me.”

She meant it, Richard knew. She had never wanted to know before, but she would want to know now—she would get over the hard-bitten practical streak in her, the brassier counterpart to Richard’s own rationalism, and she would do it for the same reason he had. She would do it for Jack, because now they knew Jack needed it. And maybe, despite everything his father had done to her, she would do it for him too. _All the men in this family._

Richard wanted to see Queen Laura, but he would have to leave that for another time. (Was he already planning on coming _back_? Yes, he guessed he was. He finally understood Jack’s love for this place, where every bit of earth felt strangely hallowed. Where he, Richard, was even capable of thinking such a thing.)

For right now, he was here for a cure—or at least a palliative—for Jack’s soul-sickness. And he felt surer than ever that it could be found here.

In the Territories, Yale seemed to be a cross between Stonehenge and a convent. The arch Richard had been standing under had remained an arch, but it was now an arch in a forest of arches and pillars. There was no roof, only these supports that stood there nakedly, as if the only thing they were holding up was the sky itself. The blue-black birds flew freely in between them, gathering their snowflakes. Women moved there too, with the same deliberateness and grace as the birds. They were all dressed alike, in long gray velvet cloaks and boots as red as raspberries.

Were they praying? Meditating? Whatever they were doing, Richard couldn’t imagine interrupting it. He felt a stillness in this place that he couldn’t shatter. And he didn’t even know if he was allowed to be there. He extricated himself from the arch and walked off, heading towards the nearest jumble of buildings that he could see.

His wool coat had stayed a wool coat, only different in style now—with frog closures instead of buttons, and long enough to brush against his thighs—but his corduroys had turned into something rough and homespun, oatmeal in color and flecked with dark bits that almost looked like chaff. He hadn’t been wearing any gloves, but it was colder in the Territories than it had been in his world, and now he tucked his hands in his pockets as he walked.

That at least gave him the idea to reach for his wallet, which let him inventory the rest of the changes he’d undergone. His wallet had become a soft leather bag strung up close against his belt, and Jack had been right: Richard’s money had turned into jointed sticks. Richard ran his finger along one of them, counting the little knots and notches, and he couldn’t help speculating about what kind of counterfeiting problem the Territories had.

His watch, last year’s birthday present from Aunt Lily, had gone through the strangest transformation of all. Instead of any kind of timepiece, it had become a kind of bracelet bearing a large medallion, a medallion emblazoned with an unfamiliar crest.

Richard didn’t know what he would have done if the village—New Haven?—had been substantially different from the market Jack had encountered. He’d had the brief, nightmarish vision of needing to go door-to-door, disturbing random villagers while they were at their dinner tables.

But there was some kind of stone courtyard that acted as a town square, and it was humming with activity. A woman with strong, concrete-slab arms was leading a team of two-headed oxen, hauling their doubled-yokes around as easily as if she had some toy poodles on a leash. A man in grease-stained clothes was basting some roasting meat with honey, and the smell of the honey spattering into the flames made Richard feel like his stomach was empty all the way to his backbone. He’d eaten breakfast that morning, but that seemed like years ago at this point. The meat wasn’t ready yet, but before he’d even realized what he was doing, he’d traded some of his jointed sticks for a squashy kind of nut pie that oozed sweet brown syrup. It was like pecan pie, he thought after the first sticky, intoxicating bite, but richer and a little less sweet. The crust was sturdy, letting him eat it by hand, but when it crumbled in his mouth, it had an almost shortbread-like butteriness to it.

When he had finished the pie, when the sharpest edge of his appetite and his curiosity had been dulled, Richard could look around with a little less amazement and a little more _interest_.

Who here would know something about soul-sickness?

And was it taboo to go around asking about it? Even if it wasn’t, Richard couldn’t imagine what his reaction would be if someone had staggered up to him in the middle of a department store, his mouth sticky with pie, and said, _What do you know about the treatment of clinical depression?  
_

But then he remembered Jack saying, _They live in a mystery_.

They accepted that there was so much they didn’t know that they might not mind handing out the answers they did.

And it was for Jack.

_For Jason’s sake, be bold._

Richard found the closest thing he could to a pharmacy, a kind of apothecary stall that seemed to sell herbs and soaps and bottles containing liquids of various alarming colors.

The elderly man running the stall sold two goat’s milk soaps to a young girl in a too-big velvet dress and then turned to Richard. “Aye, lad? Perfume for your pretty? Soap for your mam? Cure a headache, cure a toothache, cure an ague—”

“I was wondering—” Richard swallowed. “I was wondering if you had a cure for soul-sickness.”

The man’s wrinkled face grew more wrinkled still, as if collapsing in on itself with pity. “Son, I could tell you I did, as there’s others in this business who will, but I won’t sell sugar-water dressed up as miracle cures. By the Lady, I won’t do it. And there’s no syrup or salve in any shop that will mend your soul for you. Is it yours, lad?”

“No. My brother’s.” But it felt like it was his, now, with the way those words were sinking to the bottom of him, poisoning everything along the way.

“Who told you there was a cure?” He didn’t ask the question like it was rhetorical, which confused Richard; he asked it like he truly wanted to know, like the answer would make some difference to him.

The strangeness of it startled him into saying, “Jack,” but what he heard, and what the man heard, was, “Jason.”

The man took that in, and when he spoke again, it didn’t sound like he’d just thought Richard was saying someone _named_ after Jason DeLoessian had told him that—it sounded like he thought Richard had heard something no one else ever had. “It was Jason as was seen by the Queen’s bedside when she was delivered of her sickness, those winters back,” he said thoughtfully. “Jason come back again, to breathe life into his mam once more. There is no cure for soul-sickness in my bottles, lad, but if Jason told you to hope for one all the same, then I suppose hoping’s what you ought to be doing, for your brother’s sake. Mayhap there’s an answer for you somewhere.”

“Where would you try?”

And now it was like he was standing in the men’s shoe section of a department store, he thought wryly, crazily, asking the clerk there whether or not the perfume counter sold the elixir of eternal youth.

But again, the man took him seriously. “The peddler,” he said, after a moment’s consideration. “She’s seen much an’ much, and there’s things on her cart I won’t touch for fear or wonder of what they might be. And,” he added much more conversationally, “she charges an arm and a leg.”

“I’d pay an arm and a leg.”

“ _Jason_ , lad, don’t tell her that. Then she’ll leave you naught but stumps to get around with.”

Richard smiled a little. “Where is the peddler?”

“Just yonder.” The man didn’t point—was it rude here?—but jerked his chin instead, and when Richard turned his head, he saw that he meant the woman with the two-headed oxen. They’d been pulling a cart made of heavy black wood— _Agincourt wood_ , Richard thought, fear making his stomach clench—and the cart was loaded almost to overflowing, like the snow-birds’ beaks.

“Thanks.”

“Your brother won’t thank you,” the man said, as a grim farewell, “if you get yourself too much in hock for him. Be wary, lad.”

Richard, wary but grateful, set out for the peddler.

There was a small crowd milling around her, but only at a safe distance. She spouted off no patter, unlike the rest of the vendors in the square; she just leaned against one of her two-headed oxen, her expression very much like theirs, and waited.

Now that he was closer, he could see the details of some of the things in her cart. They didn’t look too strange, but they threw off something like background radiation. He couldn’t get a fix on them: it was like his gaze slid off whatever it tried to fix on. He got only glimpses. Dark gold. Sleek black fur, oiled like an otter’s. Stones. And—was that a transistor radio? He thought it was. And some sort of pulp romance novel, the cover furled at one corner, the colors lurid and their shadows too deep.

The radiation didn’t remind him of the Blasted Lands, at least. It wasn’t … _malignant_. It was just—untamed. Violent, maybe.

 _This is too big for you,_ something whispered. _This isn’t Seabrook Island, Richard, this is the ocean Seabrook Island stood in. This is the deepest part of it, with the eyeless fish and the monsters. This is no place for Morgan Sloat’s son._

 _Fuck off,_ Richard thought. He didn’t have Jack’s gift for slipping effortlessly into the ghost of his Twinner and taking on some _Lord of the Rings_ eloquence; he had no Rushton to pull from, and he didn’t even want to. Who knew what a living Rushton would have become, without a Jason? He was just Richard, but he’d been Richard Sloat and he’d _become_ Richard Sawyer; he’d chosen the people he’d wanted to be like.

So fuck _off_.

He stepped forward, his stick-money clutched tightly in one sweaty hand.

The peddler regarded him with cool yellow eyes. She was some sort of skin-changer, Richard realized—not a Wolf but something else, like a Goat. He repressed a shiver.

“Hello,” he said politely. “I wanted to buy something that would treat soul-sickness. Do you have anything for that?”

“You’re a Stranger,” she said.

Richard hesitated and then nodded. “But I’ve been here before.”

“What you use to treat soul-sickness depends on the soul,” she said. “Yours and the one that needs the medicine.” She took a forked wooden stick out of her pocket and handed it to him.

It was ash, light-colored, the outer ring of it almost soft to the touch. Richard held it without knowing what to do with it.

“Is this—”

She snorted, and one of the oxen turned its heads to look at her with its warm, placid eyes. “It’s a dowsing rod, boy. Take it and climb up back. Hold it like this—” She demonstrated with a second stick, pressing her thumbs against the forks and holding the rest straight out before her. “Out there randy like a cock. And you think of the one you want helped. Go where it points you.”

A prissy voice asserted itself: _This is ridiculous_. It was his own childhood voice, before it had really broken, and he couldn’t say he thought too much of it. _This is ridiculous and it isn’t how medicine works._

No, but it was how magic worked. He would worry about medicine when he was back home. He would contribute research someday that would help _make_ new medicines.

But right now Jack needed magic, and if he couldn’t come and get it, Richard had to bring it back for him.

He climbed onto the back of the cart. It swayed beneath him, like he was standing on a surfboard, and he had to sway with it to keep his balance. There was no room for him to stand without being on top of something.

The smell up here was heady, like spices and incense and sex.

_If I stay up here too long, I’ll freeze. I’ll be a statue—stone or wax, maybe. Something else on the cart that no one can look at for too long._

His hands were shaking as he arranged the dowsing rod the way she’d shown him.

_Jack. For Jack._

His mind filled with a jumble of images. Jack cradling him on the road to Point Venuti, kissing Richard’s dirty hair. Jack with a magic coin burning white-hot in his hand. Jack placing the Talisman in his hand. But other things, too, a thousand other unglamorous moments. Jack sleeping on a crinkled-up Hershey bar wrapper. Jack saying shortly, _I flew_. The baffling look of his softened feet, of Travellin’ Jack having done no travellin’ of late. Jack asleep in front of the TV, the Technicolor blur of one of Aunt Lily’s films painting his face in melted Popsicle shades.

The Territories crowded around him:

_Jason Jason Jason_

But Richard instinctively pushed back. _Jack,_ he insisted. Maybe there wasn’t always a difference, but there was right now.

The dowsing rod swung hard to the left. Richard stumbled along after it, digging his fingernails into the soft wood so that it wouldn’t slide out of his sweat-slick hands. It was still tugging forward hard enough to hurt, and he watched a little dizzily as a crescent of blood opened up under one of his nails. Any second now it would be too much for him, it would rip his fingers off completely if it had to—but he tightened his grip, dug in hard despite the pain, and then—

It stopped. The point of the stick was resting against a coil of black and white rope. When Richard picked it up, the fibers of it were so coarse that they almost hooked into his palms.

_Better get out of here while the getting’s good, chum. You don’t want to become part of the merchandise._

He made his way out of the cart, shaking and stumbling.

Great, he thought sourly as soon as his feet hit the ground. He had a rope. That would help Jack, sure.

All the same, he wasn’t letting go of it. Not a chance.

He gave the peddler back her dowsing rod. He could see streaks of his blood on it, and one of his fingers was throbbing wildly. Richard didn’t want to look at it.

If she asked for more than he could give, he’d run—run and try to flip back as soon as he could. He’d never stolen so much as a stick of a gum, but he was prepared to do it now.

“How much?” Richard said.

The peddler smiled. Her canines were a little more pronounced than usual, but not too much, and she didn’t have Wolf’s look of having too many teeth all together. But there was some kind of scrimshaw carving in there somewhere.

“Make me an offer,” she said.

He’d been so worried about whether or not he was going to be able to flip that he hadn’t thought to put any extra cash in his wallet this morning, but he’d had seventeen dollars and the emergency fifty tucked behind his driver’s license. (Richard’s father had been a great believer in emergency money, and while his father had been wrong about many things, Richard thought he was right about that.) Richard wanted to get back to Jack, not waste time on haggling. If he needed to steal, he might as well know it right away.

He dug out all his jointed sticks, all sixty-seven dollars’ worth of them, minus the cost of the pie, and thrust them at her.

“There. It’s all I have.”

But she wasn’t interested. She turned her head and spat. “That’s not—”

Richard’s muscles had just tensed up to spring away when he noticed that she’d stopped in her rejection. She was staring at him, at his hands, but not at the money. She was staring at his wrist, jutting out now from the wool sleeve of his coat.

Staring at what his birthday watch had turned into, that heavy crest.

A present from Aunt Lily. A present, Richard realized, from _Queen Laura DeLoessian_ , and one that seemed to have marked him in some way.

The peddler couldn’t take her eyes off the crest. “Is your claim to that honest?”

Richard at last stumbled across a bit of Territories-speak, as if the occasion demanded it: “May God the Carpenter saw my hand off Himself if it isn’t.”

He regretted it immediately. He sounded, he thought, like a little kid playing dress-up, waving around a cardboard sword coated in tinfoil and claiming he was a Knight of the Round Table.

The peddler wasn’t struck by the playacting of it, though. She studied him intently. “If that’s so, give me a lock of your hair, and that’s all I ask.”

Richard didn’t hesitate. “Do you have any scissors?”

 _Scissors_ came out as something closer to _cutting implement_ , like he would have accepted anything from a knife to a pizza cutter, which he supposed was true.

The peddler shook her head, even though Richard could see a knife on her belt. “That won’t do. You have to pull it out, by the roots.”

In for a penny. Richard’s hair was just long enough for him to twine a bit of it around his finger, close to his scalp, and he did that and then _pulled_. The pain was bad, but not as bad as the sense of _uprooting_ some part of himself, not as bad as how he could almost hear his skin tearing. He panted, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth, trying not to vomit, and he realized his hand had drifted away from his head. He lowered it and looked at his prize: a now-bloodied hank of his own hair. He’d been generous, he thought, no one could say he hadn’t. Generous or at least precise—a _lock_ had, to him, implied something more than a strand or two.

It felt grotesque to hold it out to her, but it was what she wanted, so he did. She took it from him and tied it off neatly with a little strip of leather.

And then, to Richard’s surprise, she pressed her knuckles to her forehead in a kind of salute.

***

When he flipped back to the Territories, he was far enough away from campus that it took him an hour to walk back.

Jack’s rope had become a scarf, black-and-white and obviously homemade. It looked itchy. Richard, indulging in more superstition than he wanted to, didn’t put it on, even though he could have used it—the wind had gotten much worse—but stuffed it in his pocket instead. Richard’s scalp throbbed dully.

By the time he got back to his dorm, Jack was asleep, curled against the cinderblock wall, the blinds pulled against the setting sun. He’d been sleeping a lot lately. Richard almost hated to wake him—he knew that these retreats into sleep were the only real grace periods Jack had had since all this had started. But he had to _know_.

He shook Jack’s shoulder gently. “Jack, Jack, wake up. It’s Richard.”

Jack turned to him, blinking at him fuzzily. The usual clean lines of his face had softened lately, like he was melting away right before Richard’s eyes.

Despite everything, Jack smiled a little to see him. “Hey, Richard.”

“I got you something.” He brought the scarf out of his pocket and laid it down in a puddle against Jack’s chest.

“A scarf?” Jack sat up, rubbing his eyes. He didn’t sound too puzzled—for Jack, probably, someone waking him up to drop a scarf on him probably counted as more or less normal. He took hold of it, and then his lips parted a little.

It was still carrying the scent of the Territories, of air clearer and sweeter and more open than anywhere in Richard’s own world.

“Richard,” Jack said.

Richard looked away, feeling vaguely embarrassed. “It’s supposed to help.” He pushed his glasses up. “It’s only appropriate at this point, as a kind of family tradition, to have this kind of imported medicine.”

Jack stroked the scarf. The white stripes of it almost seemed to be glowing, luminous in the dimness of the room, while the black stripes were deep and dark but … _full_. Full of memories, of acknowledged horrors, of shadows that had been contained. He wound it carefully around his neck, that scratchy knitting right up against his bare throat.

And something in his face changed. There was more light there. There was more _Jack_.

He looked at Richard, and his eyes were shining with tears. “Richie boy,” he said. “You went over there and got this for me? And what the hell happened to your hair?”

Richard ignored the second question. “There’s a very good market in their version of New Haven.”

Jack hugged him hard, the angle such that he was driving Richard’s shoulder into his own chest, which Richard thought had to have hurt, but Jack didn’t stop, not for a long time. Richard wrapped his arms around him and looked at his birthday watch. He sent up a silent thank you to Aunt Lily, who had decided to mark him as part of her family, despite everything, and who had so given him some kind of grace and notability to take into the Territories with him.

“Does it feel any better?” Richard said, when they were finally separated again.

“Yeah. It’s not perfect, but—I could eat.” He smiled more broadly this time, and now there weren’t any more tears. “I could eat and I could _talk_ —if you don’t mind listening to it all over again.”

Richard didn’t. He ordered an enormous pizza—double-pepperoni and green peppers and onions—and some Cokes, and the two of them sat cross-legged in the middle of Richard’s dorm room like kids. They ate, and Jack told him again—more haltingly this time, as if the words actually mattered—about 1981, about the Territories and cancer and the Sunlight Home and Wolf. By the time it was dawn, Jack was saying, “And when we’re off for the summer, I can show you the palace they set up in tents, the one on the coast.”

Richard had an internship this summer, one that Jack kept forgetting about because Jack was a big believer in summer vacations. It was only twenty hours a week, he thought. He could make time for this. He could always do that.


End file.
